


and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

by nagia



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Gore, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, F/M, Frank Castle Doesn't Like Magic: The Fanfic, Gen, Kastle Halloween 2016, Practical Magic Fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 02:27:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8427721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: The sudden return of Karen's long-buried heart throws her life into turmoil, as she realizes what it has to mean: her father has done the impossible.  Her brother is alive.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [captainkilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/gifts).



> With thanks to Cait, Leviathanmirror, Ali, Miranda, and Atti for putting up with my wailing about this fic and doing characterization checks and helping me remember my folklore.

(2006)

Karen is nineteen still, when the car accident happens. She woke in the night to the death watch beetle, its horrible sound — somewhere between a clock's ticking and a wet, organic buzz — constant as a heartbeat. Counting down the seconds until someone she loves dies.

Looking back, she thinks she should have driven back to Fagan Corners at the first sound. Gathered her family close, behind the wards on the Page family property. Fought the curse that way, instead of trying to slap the shit out of the death watch beetle.

But she didn't do that. Doesn't do that. Instead, she chases it all day. She hears its call turn frenetic, as fast-paced as her heart feels. And then silence.

Karen slaps her hand down on it, sitting in her half-destroyed dorm, bricks pulled loose from walls, panels pried up from the floor, furniture overturned. Pounds the damned bug to a smear with the heel of her hand. It's a greasy stain on her skin that she washes off under a warm tap, wrinkling her nose with distaste.

The call comes twenty minutes later anyway.

* * *

Her father gives the eulogy. It's a cold January morning and Karen stares at the coffin on its bier, ready to be lowered into the grave, her father's breath fogging white even in the daylight. The funeral home had to light a bonfire on Kevin's spot for three days and nights running, just to warm the earth enough to dig in.

She'd been there each night, murmuring the spell under her breath. Twining branches from rowan trees and flowers still on their stems and green, glistening ivy into a garland, her fingers bone-white in the snowy, starlit darkness. The fire hadn't touched her, not really. After the first mumbled incantation, she'd stopped feeling its warmth. That feeling had gotten stronger and stronger, like the cold was taking her over. Crawling in under her fingernails and never crawling out, just hovering beneath her skin, freezing her bones and her blood.

Her breath doesn't leave plumes of white in the air at Kevin's funeral. The cold is with her, wrapped around her heart.

When the assembled all step forward to lay their winter flowers down on Kevin's closed casket, Karen rests the garland among them. The garland is warm in a way she isn't, anymore.

"You carry my heart," she says, softly. "You carry it with you into the ground. My heart is gone from me, that you might carry it."

Ritual words. She looks up from the casket, and the world is crisper, clearer. She draws in a deep breath, and finds that she can almost smile.

* * *

(2016)

There's no warning.

Karen's grabbing shots from the bar — two for her, two for Foggy — when her chest starts to feel strange. It's heavy, and something inside it is hot and beating, writhing like maggots in a corpse, pulsing with warmth that burns outward. 

It's like being invaded. It's like being set on fire.

She drops the glasses, but she doesn't hear them crash against the bar's nice, clean wooden floor. She's too busy folding her hands over a spot just left of the center of her chest, away from the breastbone, feeling the sudden pulse and rush. She opens her mouth wide, pulls in deep lungfuls of air that feels surprisingly cold and crisp in her mouth but can't seem to kill the fire inside her.

Foggy hurries with her out of the bar, into the cold, October air. Her breath leaves clouds of white, clearly visible in the hazy glow of New York night, and she stares. He stares, too, because in the year he's known her, he's never seen that.

"I need to call home," she tells him. "I don't, I don't know what could have happened, but."

That wriggling, terrible thing inside her chest — something finally filling the hole in the world where her heart should be — flickers, and she stumbles.

Stumbles northward.

Foggy watches her with dubious eyes. "You're having chest pains and your breath is finally warm enough to show up in air like this, and you think something bad happened at home? I thought this was a super power, Karen. I thought you were hiding, I don't know, mutant ice powers from the world."

Karen just shoots him a look and then grabs her cell phone from inside her purse with fingers that shake. She dials the number from memory, drilled into her when she was a child.

The phone rings, and rings, and rings. Just when Karen thinks it's going to voicemail — just when she's looking up at the moon for spots of blood or rings of light, noticing that the damned moon is new, is dark, has turned its face away from the world, oh Jesus _Christ_ — someone picks up, and her mother's voice whispers, "Hello, Page residence."

"Mom," Karen gasps. "Mom, what's going on up there?"

There's a clatter in the background. Two furious male voices.

"I think your father has done something... something very wonderful, or very unwise," her mother says.

Karen hangs up.

Foggy asks her, his eyes wide, "What happened? Karen? What's wrong?"

"I think my father raised the dead."

She kind of wishes she'd caught Foggy's reaction on camera.

* * *

They make it back to her apartment building, and she has to explain the whole story. Foggy drinks coffee through most of it, going through cup after cup after cup. Surprisingly, he never adds whiskey to it, though she offers.

"Are you gonna go back?" He asks, when the story runs dry and she feels as empty and hollow as she did all those years ago, useless and wrung out.

Karen stares at him. Considers going back north. Facing her father. Her brother. Stepping past the wards on the Page family home —

"No," she says. "I don't really want my heart back."

That answer surprises him, she can see that, but it's the truth. A heart is a dangerous thing for her to have.

* * *

Her mother sounds deliriously happy when Karen calls the next day. She can't remember ever feeling as happy as her mother sounds. Not when Kevin had been born. Not when she'd learned to drive. Never.

"Can I talk to him?" She asks.

And her mother laughs, and laughs, and says, "Oh, honey, of course."

Kevin's voice is different. Fainter, like it's being pushed through his mouth from some great distance. Raspy, like it hurts coming out. "Kare? Kare, is that you?"

And she understands, now, how their mother could have sounded so happy. It's like her whole chest is filling up with golden light. She's so relieved that her lungs almost don't want to work, made so weightless by it that Karen actually feels herself leave the ground, only her toes still touching. She sees strands of her hair drift upwards in the unnatural lift.

"Kevin? Oh my god, it's you, it's you! You're really back!"

Like he's having to shout across an entire ocean, from one shore to another, Kevin whispers, "I'm here."

"Oh god," she says, "oh god, oh god. Am I — am I allowed to come visit — oh, Kevin, I'm so sorry, I should have come home —"

Karen has to cut herself off. She sounds so needy, so desperate to be forgiven for something that wasn't really her fault. She might not have stopped it if she'd been home. And Kevin is back, he's real, he's awake. She shouldn't make that about her own useless, formless guilt.

"I have something of yours," he says. "Do you want to come get it? I can bring it to you."

"Keep it," she tells him. "I don't need it."

"Everybody needs their heart, Karen." 

His voice is hoarse and so, so soft, but insistent, and something in her chest squeezes and she almost agrees. Almost says that he should come to New York and bring her heart with him. Should give it back to her, so she can have it.

"Not me," she says. "Page women shouldn't have hearts. You know why."

A long, long pause. She's thinking of the chainlink fence, and she's sure he is, too. The medical examiner had found little twists of steel in his eyeballs. She's never been able to get that detail out of her head. She presses her fingertips to her eyelids sometimes, or stares into the mirror and pulls at her skin, trying to touch the very tip of her fingernail to her eye, the way she's seen friends who wear contacts do.

She never gets very close.

"Yeah," Kevin agrees, at last. "I'll keep it for you. But can I come visit?"

"If Mom and Dad ever agree to let you out of their sight," she says. "I promise, you'll be welcome down here anytime."

When she hangs up, the warmth still hasn't left her. She can feel the thing that pumps her blood twitching uselessly in her chest, trying to be more than it is, but it doesn't. It can't. She's full of something syrupy and golden and thick, like lying beneath a window in the afternoon sun. She has to keep smoothing her hair down, as the strands escape the curls she'd shaped them into and keep trying to fly away and take her with them.

* * *

She grows restless as the days pass. Her heart is awake, but it doesn't belong to her. She calls home a lot, talking to Kevin and her mother. Her father still won't speak to her; Kevin might be back, but that doesn't make her sins forgiven or her soul clean.

Foggy seems unnerved by her now. Karen isn't sure if it's because she's bringing the crazy back into his life — crazy he'd been trying to get away from — or because she's bringing in things science can't explain. Magic had deserted her, while her heart slumbered in Kevin's grave, but now it's back and it's strong, so strong, as if her power had been hibernating, or as if the magic had missed her.

Frank doesn't notice until the twentieth. He startles her by slipping in through her fire escape window, and she drops an entire coffee pot on the floor.

She cringes while it's still in the air, wishing fervently that she weren't such an easily-startled idiot, that she hadn't dropped it —

And, even as Frank is moving toward her, the coffee pot stops for an instant. It and the spilling coffee hovers in mid-air, like gravity has gone away for a little while. Like this one spot in her kitchen has become the International Space Station or something. White steam radiates outward in whorls and spirals with no reason in their pattern, sometimes curling up, sometimes curling down.

She reaches out, grabs a cup, and swoops it around in the coffee. It all congeals nicely in the mug. She grabs the handle of the coffee pot, closes her eyes, and takes a step back, bracing herself.

The pot turns heavy in her hand, dragging her arm down, but she was just barely prepared for it. She doesn't drop it again.

When she opens her eyes, Frank has come no closer. His hand has dropped to the holster of his side-arm, but she thinks that's just a reflexive reaction to being startled. His eyes are huge in his face, trained firmly on her.

"That new, or gravity always been your plaything?"

Karen bites her lip. Holds the mug out to him, but he doesn't approach to take it. He won't, she realizes. He won't come anywhere near her until he has an answer.

She wishes she could be disappointed.

"I grew up with it," she says. "Then some stuff happened right before I turned twenty, and it went away for a while. It went away, and now it's back."

"What happened?"

From another man, that question might have sounded aimless. Lost. But Frank makes it specific: he's not asking what went wrong with the world, but what, specifically, are the things that happened that meant she lost her control on gravity.

"I lost someone, and I." She sighs. "I gave my heart to them. But magic comes from the heart, I guess, so I lost mine, mostly."

"Magic."

"Yes, Frank," she snaps, and the air in the room is suddenly heavier, but she doesn't care; she presses on. "Magic. I'm a witch. I mean I was born a witch, and I was a witch until I buried my heart — and that is only _mostly_ a metaphor — in my brother's grave. And now that my father has brought my brother back from the dead, I'm a witch again."

Frank's eyes go wider, which she hadn't thought was possible, and then turn soft. Wounded. They're prey animal eyes, not predator eyes. 

"Back from the dead?" He asks, and she can hear the thin thread of hope in his voice, even as the cynicism etches itself into the lines around his soft, red mouth.

"Yes," she says, a little more gently. "Back from the dead. And Frank — Frank, if you're gonna ask me to — I don't know that spell. I don't know its consequences. But I do know that it took my father ten years, and Kevin… I think things are hard for him."

She watches Frank's whole face harden. "You think I was gonna ask you to bring 'em back? You think that's what I —"

Karen takes a step toward him, offering the mug. "I wouldn't blame you for it, Frank. It's… it's natural. Right after he died, I would have given anything to have him back, you know? I haven't been to see him. I don't know what he's like, if he's really alive, or if he's something, something..." She trails off, because she can't call her risen brother dark or unnatural.

Even if he sounds _wrong_.

The thing in her chest twitches, and she finds herself so happy again. Full of warmth and light and cotton-candy sweetness. The world tastes like honey. She can feel her mouth pull into a smile. The kind of smile some people call 'beaming,' and it's wider than she's been able to in years. She hasn't been this happy in years.

There is nothing wrong or unnatural about Kevin. She's happy that he's home and safe.

"We can call my father," she tells him. "Mom will make him talk. It might be a long process, and I've been out of, out of the game a while, but I'm sure I can master it. It doesn't do any harm to find out if it's possible, right?"

Frank's hand has dropped back to his side-arm and he's staring at her with hard eyes again. His brow has furrowed and his mouth is set in a deep frown.

"Sure," he says, but he doesn't sound sure at all.

He leaves soon after that, and Karen watches him go, faintly confused. It doesn't matter, though. What could possibly matter? Kevin is back.

* * *

There are warnings. She scarcely notices.

Her mother calls on the twenty-third to tell her that her father has died. "I'm sending you the family spell book," her mother says, hushed and frightened. "I don't want that thing in my house — Kevin keeps — oh Kevin, he —" but Karen never hears what Kevin keeps doing about the family grimoire, because her mother breaks down into sobs that echo hollow through the telephone line.

On the twenty-fourth, a storm starts to brew. Dry leaves drift in fitful winds and dark clouds gather overhead. But the brewing keeps going, and going. The air turns sticky and dead, static electricity crackling on everything, and tempers turn sour. Foggy actually yells at one of his clients; calls her after, and is snappish, as if it's somehow her fault. That night, Matt beats several men very badly, leaves them tied up outside the fifteenth precinct.

By the morning of the twenty-fifth, the Bulletin has to report that the Daredevil has beaten two men into comas.

The family grimoire arrives that day. Her mother had packed it into a cardboard box full of other books, mostly philosophy texts, with a few ancient, yellowing treatises on the darker rituals. Things that must be done beneath the new moon, when Hecate has turned her face away. 

A blackbird flies into her window when she texts Frank to come over. She stares at it, but before she can go over to see if it's alright or if she needs to push it back to street-level with a broom, it rises. It hops onto the grate of her fire escape, then flies away.

Frank has just texted _be there in ten_ when the bird — the same fucking bird — flies right back into her window. This time, she hears its little neck snap.

She cuts her left thumb when she slides the window open to dispose of the body. She washes her hands twice, puts Neosporin and a band-aid on it. But she can still feel the cut throbbing. Red and sharp and utterly unwilling to be silent.

By the time Frank arrives, she's spread out the books and papers on the floor. For ten years, this quest had utterly consumed her father. She's lucky that she has his thought process laid out before her. If she didn't, she would never be able to figure out how he made this spell work.

When Frank arrives, though, he seems almost uninterested in resurrecting his family.

"Your father gave you all this?" He sounds skeptical.

"Mom, actually," Karen says. "My father… he died a couple of days ago."

"And that doesn't worry you? You're not — not grievin'?" Frank tilts his head, staring at her. He doesn't look or sound judgmental, but she gets the impression he's probing her. Poking at her to see what pricks.

She sighs. "Of course I'm upset, Frank. He was my father. I loved him. But we haven't spoken in ten years. I buried my heart in Kevin's grave, and then I didn't have — fear, or regret, or anything to stop me from trying to find out what happened to him. People died. Kevin's headstone was defaced. Dad said it was worse because I didn't even have love to drive me."

She sees the moment that he puts it together.

"You _can't_ grieve," he says. "Shit, your father is dead, and you ain't loved him in ten years. So you can't even be sad about it."

He says it like it's some kind of revelation, and like he pities her. That annoys her. If she had her heart, she might even be angry. "I don't love anyone anymore. It's safer that way. When Page women love, it's like poison." She waves her hand in the air, fluttering them dismissively. "There's a curse."

Frank just stares at her. Exasperated. Incredulous. He wets his lips, then looks away. Then back at her. "A curse," he says, like she owes him an explanation, something he can believe.

So she stands up. Goes to get the slim leather volume that her father gave her shortly after she turned thirteen. Learning that she had, within her, the power to kill someone just by loving them had made her first period even more awkward and awful than it had already been. Her parents had referred to the curse before that, of course, but that had been the day she learned the specifics.

Karen is perfectly willing to be the last of her particular line of Pages. She doesn't want to have that conversation with a daughter. Be careful with your heart — your heart can kill.

"This is everything we know about it. But it's real. It is. I did a _good_ thing when I buried my heart." One of the few good things she's ever done.

"Oh yeah? And how does that work, anyway? Looks to me like your heart's still beatin'." Or maybe he said _beaten_ ; she honestly doesn't hear much of a difference. There probably isn't much of a difference.

She doesn't want to explain it to him. Frank doesn't really need to know. He's just morbidly curious. She explains anyway. The spell. The garland. The effects.

"What's it mean, that your brother's got your heart now?" And now Frank's expression is narrow-eyed. Suspicious.

Karen shrugs. "He has my heart."

"Okay," Frank says. "Okay. And what can he do with it?"

Karen sees no need to answer. She stands up again. Goes to pour coffee. The air in the room feels heavy, sticky. Like there's a storm gathering.

The notion that Kevin would do anything with her heart is ridiculous.

She jumps when there's another crash. Turns toward it, and sees another blackbird slide slowly down her window. Even from a distance, she can see blood on the top of its beak.

Frank slams his side-arm back into the holster. "Been seein' a lot of that, last couple of days."

"Yeah," she says, thin, cold tendrils of disquiet creeping in past the irritation and the sense that everything is perfect. "Yeah. Me, too."

* * *

On the twenty-sixth, Kevin answers the phone. The world turns wonderful again. She almost isn't worried.

"Kevin," she says. "What have you been up to?"

His voice sounds a little clearer, a little closer, when he replies, "I helped Mom grade papers. I think she's upset that I'm not... I'm not sadder. But I've been there, you know? And it's hard, Karen. It's hard to care sometimes. A lot of things just don't seem to matter as much."

"So, you're still dead?"

Kevin makes a thoughtful noise. "I don't know," he says. "What do you think I am?"

"My baby brother," she tells him, voice firm.

"I think I'd like to come to New York and see you soon," he says.

She smiles. "I"d like that."

She doesn't think to wonder how he knows where she is.

* * *

On the twenty-seventh, no one at home answers. But Kevin calls her from a Vermont number. The worry slides away, like blood dripping down her windowpane.

He sounds almost completely normal.

The air turns even drier, even colder. She stares out her window at the office — dimly recognizing the reflection of two of her co-workers shouting at each other while Ellison watches, incredulous, waiting for the right moment to cut in — and looks at those dark, heavy clouds. There's something sick in the city, she thinks, and if the storm would only break, if it would just break and go away, the sick thing would be washed clean.

* * *

Frank shows up again that night. She gets the feeling he's chasing something, but she's looking into the resurrection spell. Some sick, calculating part of her wonders what he would do if she could bring his family back. Do it right, like her father did with Kevin.

But once again it's not what he's after. It kind of scares her, that he's not interested in it. He seems to think that something has gone wrong with the world.

But he also seems to trust her once more. Or at least, he's decided he trusts her more than he's seemed to since he saw her performing magic. He stands close, and his gaze is intent. Eyes soft. He sucks all the air out of the room, looking at her like that. Takes up all the space, completely commands her attention.

She sets the books aside and creeps closer to him, every step cautious. He allows it, searching her face.

"You dropped the O'Rourke thing?" He asks her. He's taking up all the space in her kitchen, now. Frank pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot she keeps full.

"For a little while, yeah. I." She folds her hands together, squeezes them. "I want to see how he did it. What he used. What the consequences are."

The silence before his reply seems to last forever. She could live and die a thousand lifetimes between her admission and his response. She lives and dies them all under the weight and force of his gaze.

"O'Rourke thing was gonna get you killed," he says. "Let me know when you get back into it; you might need back up."

He settles in to peer through her evidence, the photos she snapped and the documents she stole. She settles in near him, still digging.

* * *

The next morning, Ellison brings her three things: a Windler County Gazette, a photograph of a homeless man wrapped in an Army blanket with a red-black, yawning hole in his chest, and a steel flask.

"Take the day," Ellison says. "Actually, you have five days bereavement leave. I mean, unless you want to go after whoever took the hobo's _heart_. In which case, I'm going to have to talk to HR about mandatory counseling, and whether I can do that."

Karen takes the Gazette and stares at the front page. Above the fold. Local Minister & Wife Murdered. She scans the article for the names and finds them. Paxton and Penelope Page, of Fagan Corners, Vermont.

"Holes in their chests? Hearts missing?" She asks Ellison rather than read the story.

She has her answer when he looks at her, thumbing at his glasses, and replies. "I think you should talk to the police about protective custody. I don't know who the hell has this kind of grudge against you, but —"

A bird smacks into the windowpane. Blood on its beak, droplets gathering underneath its sightless, judgmental eyes. It makes a wet, squelching squeak against the glass as it slides slowly down, and she has to raise her fingers to her mouth to stop an inappropriate laugh.

Her father didn't bring Kevin back right at all, Karen realizes.

But then the thought, the fear, slips away. Beyond her grasp. She stares at Ellison and knows she must look as empty and confused as she feels.

"I think I need the day," she says.

Ellison offers her the flask.

* * *

Kevin is waiting for her on the front step when she gets home. He's wearing the Champlain College hoodie she'd bought him from the bookstore during her freshman year. He looks —

God, he looks just the same. His hair falls naturally in loose ringlets, the golden blond of his childhood darkened to something brassier, and his big blue eyes are intelligent, aware. Not glassy, filmed-over. Not full of chainlink scrap. He has her nose, her chin, her cheeks, though a broader jawline he's still growing into.

As if he senses her approach, he raises his eyes from the smartphone he'd been playing with. His whole face lights up when he sees her, mouth widening into a smile that dimples his cheeks, eyes sparkling with happiness. Just the way he had when he was a toddler, when he was a kid and she'd gone to pick him up from school, when he was in highschool and she was home from Burlington.

Her chest fills with something warm and sticky-sweet. Her heart twitches uselessly inside, but she doesn't care. He's here. He's back.

Her feet actually leave the ground again. She kicks uselessly in the air, her toes dangling, feels her hair turn into a swirl around her, like she's floating in eight feet of water rather than a foot off the earth.

He drops the phone and slams into her, his face colliding with her stomach, and she reaches down, running her fingers through soft hair, passing them over the soft, warm skin of his neck. Alive, alive, he's actually —

They're both floating, now, and she's lucky their street is deserted or else people would have questions. Karen closes her eyes, breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth.

Her heels touch back to the street, gently, without her ever having to let go of Kevin.

"Come on in," she tells him. "You didn't tell me what happened to Father. And — oh god, Kevin, who killed Mom? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?"

"Mom told me to run," Kevin says. "I never saw — I didn't know — I spent the night on the bus —"

* * *

There's been a cleaning crew in the building. Somebody's polished the elevator doors to a mirror-bright shine. Kevin pulls his hoodie up and slouches away from his reflection. Karen wonders about it, but she doesn't ask. She could hardly blame him, if his reflection seems unfamiliar. Strange.

She's just glad he's alive to have one.

He drops a duffel bag right next to her door when they make it up to her apartment. Karen can't seem to let go of him, her fingers constantly reaching for his warm hands, pulling him into the occasional hug. He's tall for a sixteen year old boy, but he's an inch or so shorter than she is.

He rests his head against her chest, obviously listening to the noise of her non-metaphorical heart. His eyes flutter closed, lashes dark against his pale skin. There are freckles dotting his nose and cheeks. She'd forgotten all about them.

She'd forgotten his freckles. The sound of his voice, finally settling into its adult timbre.

Karen reaches out and presses two fingers to the side of Kevin's throat. Waits, and feels her eyes close with relief, feels gravity lessen its stranglehold on the world around her, when she feels a pulse there. Slow and steady, but strong.

He's not some simulacrum. Not just a dead body recovered from the grave, restored enough to walk in the daylight, and with a soul shoved in. He's _real_.

They stay like that, him listening to her heart, her feeling his pulse, for a couple of minutes. Then he fidgets away, and she lets go. He unzips the duffel and reaches in, withdrawing a garland of twined flowers and ivy. The winter flowers are still soft and lush, and the ivy leaves are a dark, glossy green. Someone has wound it with twine into the shape of a Valentine's heart.

Karen covers her mouth with her fingers, staring at it. Even from here, she can feel the warmth of it. Love and sorrow radiate out from it in steady pulses. She can feel the air around her growing heavier, stickier.

She shakes her head. "Keep it, Kevin. You know I can't have it."

No matter how much she wants it.

* * *

They eat Thai from the take-out place down the street. Kevin's never had it, of course, and his eyes are wide and sparkling as he savors every bite. He falls asleep watching _Pitch Perfect_ , sprawled halfway off her terrible wicker couch. She watches him from her bed, watches the even rise and fall of his chest.

She's somehow not surprised when Frank taps on her fire escape window.

Kevin wakes up when she goes to open it. He sits up, yawning, while Frank stares at him over Karen's shoulder. After a moment Frank looks from Kevin to her face, and then back to him again.

He realizes almost instantly. She can see his expression tensing. And once again, he's looking at her with the eyes of a wounded prey animal. Eyes that look soft and betrayed.

"Frank," she says, and can't help furrowing her brow as she moves a hand in the air. The fire escape window slams shut, a little harder than she meant it to, but firmly. "That's my younger brother, Kevin. Kevin, this is Frank... Frank Castle."

Kevin rises to offer a hand. "Nice to meet you." A pause, and then Kevin squints at Frank. "How do you know Karen? Why did you come in her fire escape in the middle of the night?"

Frank returns the handshake, although he seems both wary and confused. He's silent in response to Kevin's questions. And it's not just his usual, watchful silence. She thinks she detects an edge of resentment there.

At last, Frank says, "We work together."

Kevin looks like he wants to ask more, but clearly thinks better of it. Instead, he stares between her and Frank, his eyes narrowing.

Kevin looks to her. She just smiles, then heads to her wallet. "Kevin, why don't you run down to the taqueria? I think we need churros. And don't forget the dipping sauce." She tosses him her wallet, and he catches it.

He's out the door in a flash, hoodie and duffel left behind. She sees him look back over his shoulder, though. His eyes are exactly her shade, just pale enough to pierce in the dim light. But the door clicks closed and the deadbolt flips.

The minute she can't hear his footsteps anymore, Karen says, "There's something I want to show you." She heads toward her bed, pulls the manila folder from under the others she'd stacked there.

Frank takes it. Flips through it. She knows when he gets to the part about what, exactly, had befallen her parents. He lets out a soft breath through his teeth, then says, "Christ."

"Ellison thinks I'm being targeted," she says, drifting toward the wicker couch. Kevin had left his hoodie draped across it. For something to do with her hands, she picks up hoodie, begins to fold it so she can set it on his bag. His cell phone and a ticket stub fall out. Karen blinks, picking up the ticket. It doesn't look like a bus ticket —

Just a few words jump out at her: Amtrak, Boston, South Station, October 27th.

The world spins. "He lied to me," she hears herself say. Her voice sounds hollow. The golden, syrupy, peanut oil-flavored perfection of earlier vanishes, replaced with cold and cotton batting. There is no writhing, twitching thing filling the hole in her chest. Just ashes and dry leaves.

It doesn't make any sense.

"He said he just got here this morning." Which had been a ridiculous lie, too. What teenager makes his way to New York City for the first time and just goes straight to his sister's tiny, depressing apartment? "He said he rode the bus all night. But —" She holds the ticket out to Frank.

He looks up from the folder, and his eyes are hard. A predator's steady gaze.

"You said you weren't sure what the consequences of raising the dead were, but now you've been digging. What are you coming up with, Page?"

Frank already knows. She can hear it, in the way his voice rasps. He's speaking to her with the voice of the Punisher, not the slightly softer tones he's always used. He looks at her baby brother and sees not only something dark and unnatural, an abomination that has upset the world's order in a hundred different ways.

He sees something monstrous. Something murderous.

Karen sinks to the floor of her apartment. Her heart is so close to her, but it's just far enough away and doesn't belong to her anymore. The space where it should be, the hole in the world that sits beneath her sternum, throbs and aches, and she wishes she could grieve. Wishes the full weight of the sorrow she should be feeling could hit her. Wishes she could be horrified by what Frank is going to think they should do.

"I want —" She looks up. Right at Frank. "I want to know for sure. I want to be sure of what he's done. What he's doing. I want to know why he's doing it. I want to make sure it can't get worse. 

She can feel the weight of his gaze on her. His voice is so hoarse, like every word hurts him as much as this whole conversation should be hurting her. "You need more proof?" 

She doesn't. Not really. "Of course I do," she says. She almost asks what he would say, if it were Lisa.

But Karen knows better than to throw his children in his face.

She retreats away from Frank. Starts packing a bag, just a couple of changes of clothes. She grabs another change of clothes and heads into the bathroom. When she emerges, she realizes it's probably the first time anyone in New York has seen her in jeans.

She slips the shoulder holster from her headboard. The Llama III-A fits snugly into the space by her ribs, hidden easily by a plaid flannel she doesn't button all the way.

The deadbolts flip as Kevin unlocks the door. He doesn't have her keys, but he hardly needed them. There's a smudge of brown at the corner of his lip. Chocolate sauce, she assumes; he's a teenaged boy, of course he started on the churros on the way back.

Kevin's got a bag of churros in his hand, and he looks between Karen and Frank. "I missed something, didn't I?"

"You mind eating in the car? Frank brought me some information, and I think — I think we need to head back to Fagan Corners. I want a look at the house."

"It's a crime scene. We can't go in." The hand holding the bag of churros looks — dark, somehow. His fingernails, she thinks. One of the nails has split, and there's a lot of — something red-black — under the others.

"We're Pages," she points out. "Nothing's going to keep us off our property if we want to be there."

Kevin looks back to Frank, then back to her. He was never very good at hiding what he was thinking; she learned that early, but Kevin never had. And now she can see how hard he's thinking. Something has him nervous. "Frank, are you coming with us?"

Frank shakes his head once. "No. Got somethin' to finish here."

She locks the fire escape window behind him. Watches as he checks his MRAD. He turns just slightly, enough that she can see his face. He raises his chin, but his eyes are cold.

He saw Kevin, too.

* * *

Her father's church — the first thing anyone coming into Fagan Corners proper even sees — is shuttered and dark. There should be a light in one of the windows on the second floor. Her father always left a light in that window.

But all she sees is dim panes of glass. The downtown's streetlights buzz a fitful, weary orange.

She drops Kevin in the town's only hotel, a bed-and-breakfast that's about two years younger than her father's church. Owned in the Carrington family since a few years after the town had even been founded. The drive had been about six hours, and she's lucky that the Carringtons are already awake, getting breakfast options ready for the few tourists who have come in to look at Vermont's foliage.

"Get back to sleep," she tells Kevin.

She digs in her coat pocket as she leaves, pulling out a salt packet. She sprinkles it in a line outside the door to their room. It's a quick and easy ward — nothing with ill intent can pass that sort of barrier, laid down by a Page.

It's not until she's down the stairs and out the door, keys in one hand and phone in the other, that she realizes she just warded her little brother inside their hotel room like he's something to guard against. It leaves her kind of wanting to cry.

Frank slides into the passenger seat before she can start her car. He's furrowed his brow and his nose is wrinkled.

He holds out his phone. She looks through it, grainy, poorly-lit photos of a taqueria she recognizes. A man with an apron in his lap had collapsed in a corner, his eyes still open wide, his expression some rictus of pain and fear.

There's a gaping hole in the man's chest. She can see the blood-encrusted meat inside him, a pink flash of a lung, white ribs peeking out. No sign of a heart, though.

"You saw his hand and his mouth?" Karen asks, quietly. Thinking back to the few moments before they'd left New York.

"You need more proof, Page?"

Karen closes her eyes. It hurts, _god_ it hurts — she hadn't thought anything would hurt this much after she gave her heart away — but she has to admit it. There's almost no chance that Kevin isn't pulling out people's hearts, and apparently _eating_ them, if the dark stain on his mouth means anything.

"There's one more thing I need to see," she tells him.

Frank arches his eyebrows like she's crazy, but he doesn't object as she drives them to the only morgue in Fagan Corners: the one operating out of the Windler County Medical Center. She almost scoffs in annoyance at how easy it is to get to the medical examiner's office; not one of the security flaws she exploited ten years ago has been fixed.

This time, though, rather than head for the medical examiner's notes, Karen goes to the wall. There are only a few cold chambers, and Karen opens them all. She finds her father on the third try, sliding the tray out to reveal his face. She can't help but stare at how pale his skin is, at the lines on his face she doesn't remember.

With all the new gray in his blond hair, and the stern line of his brow, he would look distinguished, if he didn't look sad. She sees no evidence of pain on his face. Just a distant sadness, like he'd known what was coming. If he'd known what Kevin really was, what Kevin was going to do, and hadn't warned anyone —

Well, then he'd have been a bastard to the last, and that wouldn't much of a surprise to her, would it?

Karen reaches out and unzips the body-bag just enough to reveal the hole in his chest. The medical examiner has already done the Y-incision and sewn it back up with thick black stitches, and the sight of it makes her father's thin, frail frame look different somehow. Monstrous, maybe, but mostly just sad and pale. 

She takes out her phone and leans in. Uses her phone camera as a magnifying glass.

"The heart is gone," she says. "But look at those scratches around the hole. Human nail marks? Tool marks?"

"Could be anything," Frank grunts. He's watching her just as closely as he's looking at her father's body. Maybe closer.

Karen unzips the body bag further, and reaches for her father's hands. She picks up the right one first, looks at it. No cuts, no bruises. No split nails. She closes her eyes and tries to look with her other sense, but there's nothing. No residue at all. If her father worked magic with his right hand after resurrecting Kevin, it left no sign.

The left hand is a mess. His pinkie, ring, and middle fingers have all shriveled and withered into something thinner and gnarled. Not like fingers at all. She doesn't have to close her eyes to feel the lingering traces of some dark, horrible ritual.

When she finally brings herself to touch the skin around his chest, she senses something similar.

"He's... consuming the hearts," Karen says. Her voice comes out strained but calm. Feelings crowd and throb around the hole in the world where her heart should be, but she ignores them. "Kevin, I mean. When he takes a heart, it's like the ritual that brought him back in the first place."

"So he's doin' it to stay alive." Frank's whole expression has curled into disgust.

She thinks back to how distant her brother's voice had sounded, the first time she'd spoken. How normal and alive he seems now.

"I think he did it at first to make himself more alive. And now he has to... to maintain."

When she looks up, Frank looks sick with disgust. It's not a very showy expression — really, none of his expressions are showy — but she can easily read the faintly scrunched nose, the narrowed eyes, the way his mouth curls down.

After she closes her father's cold chamber, she doesn't go looking for her mother.

* * *

The little line of salt around his room is undisturbed when she returns. She steps on it with the ball of her foot, then drags her foot back along the hardwood floor, breaking the line.

Kevin looks up from his phone when she steps into the room. From his position, she'd guess that he hasn't moved since they arrived.

Karen closes and locks the door, then crosses to the other bed. She collapses on it. Feels herself go boneless and tired. Drained. It's been such a long day. A long week, a long decade.

"What was it like?" She finally asks. "Being dead. Coming back. How did it feel?"

Kevin rolls over onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says. "I don't remember being dead. I didn't even know, you know, until Dad explained. Mom said Dad — you know. Dug me up. Left me in the basement for nine nights. But I woke up in my bedroom. It looked a little neater, maybe, but."

But otherwise unchanged. Even before she'd left the house for good, Kevin's room had been becoming a shrine. A touchstone, for how their lives used to be. Who they had all been.

"Mom said I screamed for the first hour and a half. They didn't move me to my room until I stopped screaming. I don't know what I saw, or if I was in pain. Maybe coming back from the dead sucks." He looks at his hands. "The process, I mean. Being alive isn't bad."

"Do you remember dying?"

He rolls over to look at her. His eyes are the same shade as hers, piercing in the early morning light, and Karen looks back at him.

"You mean do I remember how I died," Kevin says, and then he sighs. "Dad said you went a little… that you got really, y'know, extreme. After I died."

She swallows. "I did, yeah. But… yeah, Kevin, yeah. That's what I meant. "

Kevin offers her a short, bitter laugh. "I don't remember any of it. Like the whole month before I died is gone. I woke up, I thought it was December 2005, you know?"

"Should have guessed it wouldn't be that easy," she says. Her voice comes out strained again. Honestly, just sounding strained is good, because every one of his words hit her like a hammer. Kevin doesn't know anymore. She'll never know.

She's about to have to kill her brother again, and she'll never understand why he died in the first place.

"You know I love you, right?" She says.

"You don't have a heart." He offers her a smile. "I want you to take it back."

"You know I can't do that."

But Kevin goes to the bag and unzips it. Takes the garland out. "It's yours," he says.

She can feel a lump forming in her throat. "You know I can't —"

"I want you to have it." Kevin offers her a smile, but she can see what it costs him. She can see the simple animal fear in his eyes, and when he holds the garland out to her, his hands are shaking.

She doesn't say anything. She just gets up from the bed. Her bones ache with exhaustion and the edges of the hole inside her sting. She's not hurting, not yet. It's gotten so hard to hurt.

She remembers the cold equations she'd run in her mind in the warehouse. How swiftly she'd dismissed the idea of calling the police. The walk to the Hudson, the taxi ride back to her apartment. The way she'd stared at her shower and known she should have been sad, been scared. Should have felt unclean.

It didn't hurt, that time. But it's going to hurt now.

She takes the garland.

"I've been taking hearts left and right," Kevin says. "Might as well give you yours back."

When she looks up at him, his expression has turned flat, and his eyes are all but lifeless. He's looking at her — in her direction, maybe, or maybe just through her — but it seems like he doesn't see her.

Karen needs to get out of this room. She knows it immediately, can sense it in the weight of his stare. His intent seems to crawl all over her skin in tiny pinprick footsteps. The place where her heart once sat squeezes in foreboding.

"We'll have to head to the gravesite," she says. "That's where I did the spell. That's where I'll have to dissolve it."

It's a lie. But she's gotten good at lying, since he died. It's become so much easier, now that she's stopped caring.

She can see the moment Kevin swallows it.

* * *

In what would look like an unusual custom to those from outside Fagan Corners, the Pages never buried their people in the churchyard. Magic has run in their family since before the town was founded — and no known witch could be buried on hallowed ground. Rather than lay their dead to unhappy rest in a potter's field, or on the slope technically outside the church's graveyard, Pages were buried in a private ground on the Page property.

Karen supposes that the family had been too mired in tradition to switch to the county graveyard once it had been started in the early nineteen hundreds.

A beaten white van follows them from the bed and breakfast to the family property. They're only maybe five minutes out from town, but between the fact that they own twenty acres of forest — growing denser the closer she drives to the house, though she knows it'll clear up — and the thickness of the Vermont wood, the house had always seemed isolated and cold.

She could scream for hours, and nobody would hear, or care.

The house itself started out as a Cape Cod-style farmhouse, but as the family grew, in number and in magic and in wealth, the house had, too. Parts of it resemble some sort of Cape Cod-log cabin-Queen Anne Frankenstein's monster, at least from the outside. Inside, she recalls, it's much stranger. The one time she'd brought a friend from college home, she had joked that while it didn't look like a scary witch cabin in the middle of the woods, she wouldn't be surprised to find out that the family was haunted or something.

Karen had smiled and never brought her back.

They bypass the house entirely as it rises out of a clearing in the woods. Instead, she parks in a lot behind it. The early morning air is crisp and cold, and her breath leaves trails of white steam.

Kevin's doesn't.

They crunch their way through fallen leaves toward the family plot. Nobody's there now, for which she's grateful. The dirt on Kevin's grave is freshly disturbed. She thinks: that will make this easier, and then hates herself.

She takes off her gloves as she stares at Kevin's headstone. Her parents had long ago managed to scrub the spray paint off, it seems. There's no trace of the black marks that had been all over it the day she left home forever.

His name. His dates. _Nothing Gold Can Stay._

In the distance, she hears the soft sound of a car door. Kevin doesn't seem to notice it. He seems agitated to be this close to his grave, or maybe he's craving a heart. Either way, he paces, rubbing his gloved hands together. Blows out his breath in huge sighs, staring into the air when he realizes that her breath is warm and his isn't.

"I call my heart back to me," Karen says, and that useless thing in her chest starts to twitch again. Starts to burn, and feel even heavier. "I call it back to me, that I might carry it. My heart is my burden, and I will carry it, so I call it back."

She doesn't need to say anything more than that. That's good, because she couldn't hope to. The weight of ten years presses down on her, punching her in the chest. She actually feels herself reel backwards, wheezing, but that hardly matters, because grief and guilt and fear and anger are all shouting their ten years of grievances at her. And underneath it all, quiet and almost calm, is the soft, steady whisper of love.

 _You're sorry he's gone_ , her heart says, _and you're angry that he was taken from you, you're angry at all the deaths, you're guilty for your role in everything._

 _You love him_ , her heart says.

_You're going to kill him._

"I know," she says aloud.

Kevin looks up, startled, as she drops the garland on his grave.

She reaches out a hand to freeze him in place. Turns the air around him heavy and thick, weighs his limbs down close to the earth.

But Kevin manages to twitch a hand of his own, and his eyes burn with the cold fury of someone who's been betrayed. He seems so far away, suddenly, and then her back strikes something hard, and she realizes that Kevin was standing still and she was sailing backward. She lies where she fell for a moment, but as Kevin starts stepping toward her — his movements ungainly, uneven, unnatural — she lunges to her feet.

Throwing Kevin backward is easy. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to have magic come so easily to her, to have the magic that comes from her heart.

He lands on another Page's grave, and it's harder for him to stand. Still, he tosses out a gesture, and Karen finds herself sliding sideways. She hears birds cawing and shrieking, even though the sun hasn't even turned the sky from inky blue to gray, and when she looks up there are half a dozen birds winging their way toward her.

She sees the outstretched talons, the flat, judgmental eyes, and ducks, raising her arms to cover her head. Instinct turns the space around her weightless, creates a bubble where her hair drifts up and her feet leave the ground. The first bird into the bubble finds itself floating uselessly, flapping its wings as it fails to fly.

The other five circle above her, clearly seeing the strangeness and wanting no part of it.

Kevin moves his hand in another gesture, and Karen feels herself being drawn toward him.

It's quick thinking, actually, but her bubble of weightlessness goes with her. And, unfortunately for Kevin, it uproots a couple of headstones. Karen kicks in her space, and then manages to rest her hand against one of the headstones.

Someday she'll apologize to Newcastle Page, b. & d. 9th February 1847, Cherished Evermore. Today, though, she feels only a horrible, grim satisfaction as Kevin has to dive behind another gravestone.

She begins flinging chunks of rock at him, the world swirling and spinning around her, her hair streaming, sometimes obscuring her face, and when she has him distracted enough dealing with those — another of the damned birds tries to divebomb her and then ends up drifting around her; she has to swat the first one away because it's blocking her vision — she reaches out again.

This time, she makes extra sure to weigh down his hands.

This time, she goes for her gun.

 _I will unload this thing, I swear to Christ_ , she'd told Frank, and meant every word. She'd emptied an entire magazine into Wesley. But as she levels the gun at her brother's face —

Her hands had shook, those other three times. They're shaking now, trembling likes leaves on a wind-struck branch. She flicks the safety off, pulls back the hammer.

And doesn't fire.

Instead, she falls to her knees, drops one hand from the gun to cover her mouth. She can feel the tears filling her eyes, hot and stinging. The lump that's forming in her throat.

He killed their parents. He killed two total strangers. He gave her back her heart so he could kill her.

"Why?" She demands.

Kevin's voice is raspy and distant, breathless, when he answers, "I got hungry. Mom made pork chops, but I could see Dad's pulse. He didn't mind. He brought me back. He knew what I'd be."

"And Mom?"

"She was really upset about Dad," he says in that same voice that seems so obviously from the other side of the grave now. A pause, and then he adds, "And I was still hungry."

"The homeless man? The taqueria cashier?"

"Hungry and hungry. But you would be the last, Kare. You gave me your heart when I was in the ground. I've got to have it, I've got to have all of it. If Dad had just sacrificed _you_ , instead of all those stupid birds, we wouldn't be here. Well, you definitely wouldn't be here, because you'd be in the basement. But Mom and Dad would be alive."

Jesus Christ. And the worst thing is: she almost wishes their father had. That he'd called her back, made her take her heart back. Cut out this thing inside her and offered it up to whatever horrifying abomination he'd made this deal with.

"You really think you're Kevin," she asks, looking up at him. Her tears have made the world blurry, but she can still see the lean shape of her brother, the curly blur of his hair. "But you're so —"

"It's me, Kare. Kevin Paxton Page. I played cello and my best friend was named Aaron Daehler. I'm just also Kevin Paxton Page, undead abomination who has a taste for human hearts. And I'm Kevin Paxton Page, and I am le tired of all this bullshit. Are you gonna do it, or are you gonna give me your heart?"

He uses that stupid fake French accent when he says 'I am le tired,' and she's put in mind of that stupid thing he'd kept quoting. Christ, they hadn't even called those dumb internet things memes when he died.

Karen stares up at her baby brother. She taught him to tie his shoes, she fastened his life jacket when they went to the lake house, she cut the crusts off his sandwiches. And he looks so angelic and trustworthy, with his brassy ringlets and his big blue eyes.

She puts her other hand back on the gun. She wants to scream, to cry, to turn her back. But instead she makes herself stand. 

She takes aim.

She fires.

She hits the ground at the same time he does. Drops the gun. It's unsafe, totally stupid, but she doesn't care. She can't hold onto the thing that killed her brother.

She killed her brother.

When she can make herself stand, she stumbles toward him. He isn't gone yet. His eyes are still alert, and though he's pale, there's still color in his face.

Karen collapses next to him. Reaches out for his hand, and she finds herself starting to cry when he doesn't pull away.

"I'm sorry," she says. Useless. Meaningless. What the fuck does it matter if she's sorry?

"Yeah, me too." He offers her a smile. "Think I was worse. I ate Mom and Dad."

"You always had to have more of everything." She doesn't bother wiping at the tears streaming down her face. Just lets them fall.

"You always made sure I got it."

"You usually deserved it."

"Not Mom and Dad."

"Not the taqueria guy, either," she says, and chokes on a laugh. "Where the hell am I gonna get churros at midnight now?"

Kevin doesn't answer.

* * *

She's in kind of a fog. Frank walks up, eventually. It could have been hours. The sun comes up at some point, staining the sky gray. Then it turns the gray dawn gold and fades into the usual reds and pinks.

Karen doesn't realize that Frank is there until he drops her gun — magazine out, slide stripped — into her lap. She stares down at the little .380 and almost doesn't recognize it. Her mind had turned the gun that killed her brother into something bigger, darker, in the minutes since she'd stopped looking at it.

She tucks the dead shell of her gun into her jacket pocket. Stands up. Realizes that she's shaking.

"He was a good kid," she tells Frank. It's important to her, suddenly, that Frank knows that. "Before he died. He was good. He played cello. He was friends with some kids on the baseball team. He didn't get into trouble. He didn't start fights. He quoted those stupid videos off the internet all the time, and he liked bands that made Dad want to tear his hair out."

"He didn't come back right." Frank reaches out, pressing one big, warm hand against her back. She turns around, then, and realizes that she could step in close, and he would hold her.

She doesn't deserve to be held. She wants it too much.

"I'll go get a shovel," she sighs.

"Get two," Frank says.

* * *

Karen weaves a crown of nettle and yew branches and maple leaves, mumbling the words over and over. She stares out her window at Hell's Kitchen, at the slow crawl of cars down its streets, at the hazy golden glow of its street lights. There are children swarming the sidewalks in thick knots. At least one child per knot carries some sort of flashing light, so that everyone can see where they are.

There are lots of Captain Americas down there. More than a few Batmen and Iron Men. She sees several girl Thors, all of them adorable. There are teenagers in red suits with devil masks — most of the teenaged boys, in fact — but she spots a few skull tee-shirts here and there. Hard to tell if they're just skulls, or if they're Frank's particular skull.

There's a thump on her fire escape, and she sees Frank standing there with a sour expression. Too many people are wearing his skull tonight, then.

She sets the crown on her coffee table, but she doesn't cross the room to open the window. It slides up at a gesture from her, and Frank shoulders his way inside.

"Kids dress up as witches and devils, too. It's not all people they idolize," she offers.

He grunts, but she sees his mouth curve into his Marlon Brando smile. It's there and gone again in the briefest of flashes.

His eyes drop to the crown on the table. "Somethin' for Halloween?"

"It's my new heart."

Frank looks at her, then at the heart. Then he looks away, wetting his lips, and finally back to her. She can see the 'you expect me to believe this' not just in his movements or his expression, but even in the way he sits.

"Your heart," he says. "That thing on the table. That's your heart."

"Metaphysically speaking."

"Christ," Frank says. "You took it out again? Didn't you just get it back from —" 

"I can't have one," she says. She doesn't say: it hurts. But she knows he sees that, because Frank always sees. "It's dangerous. But I'm not going to give it to somebody dead. I'm not. So — if you — Frank, if you're willing. Would you please keep it safe for me?"

Frank's voice and face remain flat when he says, "I don't keep things safe."

She absorbs that for a moment. Has to bite her lip to keep from replying immediately. Finally, she offers, "You kept me safe."

"That's different."

Karen looks down at her heart. "I can't keep it, Frank. I don't get to have a heart. I don't want a heart. I'm not asking you to — to do anything with it. I just want to know that it's in somebody else's hands, they won't destroy it." 

"No reason that somebody should be me," he tells her, but she can hear in his voice that he's wavering.

"I could throw it in a dumpster," she says. Karen keeps her voice deliberately offhand. "Technically, if it's in a landfill, it's not mine anymore. The curse can't hurt anyone." And she can't hurt the way having a heart does.

"You can't bury your heart in a fuckin' landfill, Page, Christ." Frank mumbles something she doesn't catch, but the impression she gets is exasperation. "You sound like your damn — you sound like a fuckin' hispter. All poetic justice about your own damn fake heart."

She's about to ask if that means he'll take it when he reaches over and picks it up. "There somethin' you gotta say to make this stick?"

Karen leans over, rests the tops of her fingers on one of the maple leaves. "You carry my heart," she tells him, and can feel herself growing colder with every word. "You carry it with you wherever you go. My heart is gone from me, that you might carry it."

He stares at her for a moment. Opens his mouth, closes it. But she releases her grip on her heart, and closes her eyes, and when she breathes out, it doesn't hurt anymore.

Beneath his hand, her heart beats, safe and warm and silent.

* * *

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in  
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere  
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done  
by only me is your doing,my darling)  
i fear  
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want  
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)  
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant  
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows  
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows  
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)  
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

\-- e. e. cummings, "[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]"


End file.
